To travel with confidence down this route the most reliable map I am given is the example of my mother’s and Grandma’s alert and accurate knowing. When I am hungry, and before I can ask, there is food. If I am weary, every place is a bed. No food that is distasteful must be eaten and there is neither praise nor blame for the body’s natural functions. A need to urinate is to be heeded whether in public or visiting friends. A sweater covers me before there is any chill and if there is pain there is care simultaneously. If Grandma shifts uncomfortably, I bring her a cushion.
Squatting here with the putty knife in her hand, she is every old woman in every hamlet in the world. You see her on a street corner in a village in southern France, in a black dress and black stockings. Or bent over stone steps in a Mexican mountain village. Everywhere the old woman stands as the true and rightful owner of the earth. She is the bearer of keys to unknown doorways and to a network of astonishing tunnels. She is the possessor of life’s infinite personal details.
Some of the Native children I’ve had in my classes over the years could almost pass for Japanese, and vice versa. There’s something in the animal-like shyness I recognize in the dark eyes. A quickness to look away. I remember, when I was a child in Slocan, seeing the same swift flick-of-a-cat’s-tail look in the eyes of my friends.
Personality: Tense. Is that past or present tense? It’s perpetual tense. I have the social graces of a common housefly. That’s self-denigrating, isn’t it?
“Some people,” Aunt Emily answered sharply, “are so busy seeing all sides of every issue that they neutralize concern and prevent necessary action. There’s no strength in seeing all sides unless you can act where real measurable injustice exists. A lot of academic talk just immobilizes the oppressed and maintains oppressors in their positions of power.”